I learned last week that I am going to be a character in a novel. Better yet, I’m the bad guy.I heard about that when I was holed up in the Statehouse Wednesday writing a column. In walked Ralph Siegel, a former reporter who now works for the Garden State Preservation Trust. Siegel immediately started laying into me for what I did in the run-up to Hurricane Irene last August. What I did was to predict – accurately - that the storm was going to be no big deal for the Jersey Shore. I also made fun of Gov. Chris “Get the Hell Off the Beach” Christie for becoming the first politician in history to evacuate people into flood zones.Siegel had to admit I got that right. But he said he’s working on a novel in which a character based on me downplays a similar hurricane, leading to a disaster of epic proportions.“Good luck,” I said. “But when it comes to storms, hurricanes are no big deal compared to nor’easters. Do you know what happened 50 years ago today?”

It wasn’t a hurricane that split Long Beach Island in two, killed 432 New Jerseyans and destroyed hundreds of houses. It was a nor’easter. In the half-century since we’ve been hit by hurricanes too numerous to recall. None amounted to more than a ripple in a bathtub compared to the March 6-7 Storm. There’s a lesson in that.I was living in Toms River in 1962. All we got in my neck of the woods was two days off from school. It was different for Len Connors. The former state senator is the mayor of Surf City, where he rode out that storm.“Houses were floating down the bay,” he recalls. “That’s when we knew we were in trouble.”As the water broke through up north, he said, a couple waded to safety. The woman told him she had left some crucial medicine at home. Connors took a boat to retrieve it. When he got to the house, he found himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.“I saw a coast guardsman with a bead on me,” said Connors. “I said, ‘Don’t shoot. You’ll be sorry and I’ll be dead.’”The Guard was out, he recalls, because back in those days the pinies would turn to piracy, sailing over from the mainland to loot wrecked homes.Now, that was a storm. After it, people started talking about abandoning the island. Connors, who is now 82, knew better. He bought empty lots on the cheap and built houses on them, guessing correctly that people would forget the storm and flock back to the island.

That building boom’s been going on ever since. And ever since, the cassandras have been warning those new structures would eventually be overrun by rising sea levels. Not so fast, says Jeff Gebert.“You could argue that the 130 miles from Sandy Hook to Cape May is doomed in the geological time scale,” said Gebert, who’s the chief of coastal planning with the Army Corps of Engineers Philadelphia District. “But in the human time scale, people have to make decisions on where they live.”And on that scale, the Jersey Shore is doing all right, said Gebert, who grew up in Bloomfield. The feds have been keeping track of sea-levels since 1850, he said, and the rise has been consistent at about a foot per century.That six-inch rise since 1962 is significant, but it can be outweighed by tidal swings. That March 6-7 storm is also known as the “5-H Storm” because it lingered through five of the highest tides that year. Hurricanes, by comparison, blow harder but don’t linger as long.“Nothing’s been remotely comparable to that ‘62 nor'easter,” he said. “But that’s not to say it couldn’t happen this year or next. In the interim, we’ve learned the art of sand replenishment, said Gebert. Figuring out how to protect a barrier island is a lot easier than figuring out how to protect towns like Cranford or Manville. The $151 million the feds have spent on Irene relief in Jersey is enough to build another whole barrier island.So excuse me if I don’t get off the beach for the next hurricane. But I’m looking forward to that novel. And when they make the movie, I want the part of the evil newspaper columnist to be played by Harrison Ford.